The City of Wolverhampton College (Wolves College / The College) is a medium-sized Further Education college based in the west midlands. At present, the college has approximately 2,300 full time and 3,500 part time learners enrolled.

For over 10 years, The College had suffered from a general lack of investment in IT infrastructure.

Having conducted an exhaustive evaluation The College selected Tribal as their replacement Student Management platform. Performance levels of the solution for the College’s ageing infrastructure were deemed poor, so a need was identified to refresh their core infrastructure completely. As a long-term trusted IT partner, Nike was invited to engage and recommend solutions.


Main Project Drivers

  • Ageing systems 10yr + old are not fit for purpose of running the latest software solutions

  • Reduce high management overheads and ownership costs

  • Too much problem solving less planning

  • Improve data security and integrity

  • Improve the efficiency of backups and Disaster Recovery

  • Opportunity to reduce carbon emissions by consolidating computing and incorporating green technology


Why Nike was selected

  • Frequent collaborators / long, trusted relationship

  • Confidence in Nike due to their 30+ years’ experience.

  • Ability to engage at many different levels within the college. Making compassionate plans around College workloads

  • Offer to carry out a detailed assessment of current platforms. Along with benchmarking for the reduction of carbon emission

Project Scope

As part of the Scope of Work, Nike carried out a detailed assessment of the following areas: -

  • Networking (Wired and Wi-Fi)

  • Storage

  • Compute

  • Campus-to-Campus resiliency (Disaster Recovery estate)

  • Secure backups

Solution Overview

In conjunction with internal and HPE presale resources. Nike was able to illustrate a strong Return on Investment of solutions benefitting the College. We designed and right-sized the new HPE architecture. Features ProLiant DL380 compute, Nimble Storage, StoreVirtual BCDR coupled with Veeam backup and replication software, Aruba wired and Xirrus Wi-Fi network

Nike solutions incorporated the following: -

  • Consolidation of infrastructure leading to a reduced carbon footprint

  • Reduced management and support overheads

  • Increased data integrity and resiliency utilising many campuses for equipment location

  • Reduction in complexity of network and VLAN settings leading to increased reliability

  • A drastic increase in performance levels in line with the client’s benchmarked requirements

  • College qualified for access to interest free Salix funding. All with Nike’s help in proving their reduction of carbon emissions

  • Meticulous planning and project management during the COVID pandemic. Resulting in fast time to deployment in a challenging period

College Feedback

Darren Webley - IT Manager Wolves College

“I couldn’t be more happy with the way Nike have engaged with us. COVID had created well documented supply chain issues, and Nike worked with us to keep us informed, and dynamically changing plans as circumstances demanded. Nike have well exceeded our expectations as a trusted partner, and we would have no hesitations in working with them again. Absolutely delighted.”

Dan Harris – Head of Facilities and Procurement Wolves College

“The College have been working with Nike for many years, and they never fail to impress and are always attentive to our needs. They brought invaluable expertise to the table and held our hand throughout the whole process. The College would not have been able to complete to budget and timescale without their invaluable experience and added value support.”

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